I’m not a big fan of “gee, sorry this site hasn’t been so active lately, I promise I’ll do better” posts, which are basically net kudzu, but since it’s a new year, it seems like a good time for a quick update: I have segued directly from working on the VJ book (out in May) […]

This was a cool surprise: Apparently the Da Capo anthology Best Music Writing 2011, guest-edited by the estimable Alex Ross, includes 32 essays on music published in 2010. I didn’t make that cut, but I appear to be represented in the “Other Notable Music Writing” list at the back, for my profile of producer Dr. […]

Today, I give thanks for self-referentiality; over the course of my life, it has made me very happy. And this week, it enabled me to write the oral history of the oral history of oral histories. Happy Thanksgiving.

I lived for many years on Broadway, about two blocks away from Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protesters have encamped. (Although Zuccotti Park itself is not familiar to me–I believe it was fenced up and under renovation for most of the years I lived near it.) In recent weeks, Occupy Wall Street’s winding, […]

Howdy. We were out of commission for a little while here at Rule Forty-Two, because the site’s database got hacked (like many other sites running on WordPress recently), redirecting readers to a malware site such as qooglesearch.com, and possibly trying to entice you to click on a fake Windows Virus Scan. Everything should be working […]

The new issue of Rolling Stone has two of the magazine’s perennial features: a cover image of Barack Obama (his fourth, I believe) and an article by me on Blink-182 (my fifth). The article isn’t available online, so if you want to read about Travis Barker’s harrowing recovery and the band’s reunion, you’ll have to […]

I don’t write about my personal life very often on this here bloggish thing, but I’m making an exception this time: my wife and I just had our second son. He’s named Dashiell, and he already rocks the house. For all the obvious reasons, posting here may be erratic for the next month or so.

I apologize for the lack of posts this week; due to a family medical emergency, the regular schedule here at Rule Forty-Two HQ may be disrupted for some time to come. I did want to mention, in a followup to last week’s post about how various songwriting partnerships work, that in an effort to plumb […]